Elitism, Like It's a Bad Thing

I told you I'd be using this more than once...

So, I read this.

It's an article in The Atlantic about the new global elite.  It has some of the inevitable panty-sniffing that you might expect from a business journalist dragging himself through the negro Davos streets looking for an angry fix a decaf cappucino.  Still, it's an OK expose.

And some points most be conceded.  Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt have advanced human commerce and society.  The true innovators, and I'd even through Zuckerberg in with that group if pressed, are worthy of rewards and riches.  Hell, Albert Pujols deserves his millions, because millions will pay for watching him be the best at what he does.

That's commerce, that's the market.

No, it's the idea that Wall Street innovators deserve anything more than a kick in the teeth that sticks in my craw.  As Volcker is quoted in the article, "Can anyone show me any evidence at all that financial innovation has led to economic growth?"  Yeah, Paul, preach it, baby.

The problem is that the "meretricious rich" - as the article styles them - have varying degrees of merit attached to them.  It was Silent Cal Coolidge - most business friendly of Presidents - who said, "The man who builds a factory builds a temple" and "the man who works there worships there."  I have a problem with the last part; the idea that the worker is some sort of supplicant peon before the altar of wealth is... creepy.

But the idea that the man who builds a factory builds a temple... I can get behind that idea.  To invent or produce something new or better and fulfill a need within society and the market is indeed a good and proper thing - all else being equal.  And they should be rewarded for that.

No one has yet explained to me how CDOs and CDSs constitute a good and proper thing.  How creating wealth for the sake of creating wealth that benefits only a narrow few is in any way analogous to "building a temple".

Again, and it bears repeating, during America's glorious ascent to economic heights in the 1950s and '60s, we taxed the living snot out of the rich.  They were still rich, but we didn't run deficits nearly as high, despite the Great Society and Vietnam.  And their riches did not create a transnational culture of the rich living in a world so far removed from ours, as to be on Mars.

I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that we need to find one.  Marx was wrong about the proletarian revolution, but revolutions do happen.  When a political economic system stops benefitting the large mass of people, they will find remedies.

I hope we can forestall the worst excesses, but when I read about the arrogance of the super-rich, I sometimes think maybe a little righteous anger is called for.